PROVMYZA art group. The “Seeds”

The Artist of the Year program is one of the Cosmoscow Foundation's most important non-commercial initiatives. It is also part of the Foundation's work aimed at the implementation of artistic projects. Its main goal is to support free artistic creativity. The choosing procedure is as follows. The special council of invited experts proposes the names of the candidacies, and then the Foundation's Supervisory Board selects the winner. The winner gets the opportunity to implement a new project and present it at the fair.

PROVMYZA (Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov) is an art group from Nizhny Novgorod that works freely with various contemporary artistic practices: video art, art house cinema, photography, graphics, installation, performance and theatre. In their work, they follow the trend of erasing the boundaries between types and genres of art.

Interdisciplinary approach allows them, in their own words, “to jump from one roof to another”. But at the same time, there seems to be one constant, a reproduction of strong empathetic images in each work, presenting the temporality of their works as an endlessly experienced time. Often, the affect turns out to be that stunning anthropological optics in the works of artists, leaving no hope of remaining an outside observer.

The group’s portfolio includes participation in major international art events, such as the Venice Biennale and the Venice Film Festival, Focus PROVMYZA at the Pompidou Center, etc., as well as the highest assessment of their works by experts of the national Innovation award and the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize.

As part of the 13th edition of the Cosmoscow fair, PROVMYZA presents the “Seeds” project. It welcomes viewers to explore such a specific and little-studied form of contemporary art as ‘performative sculpture’, which, on the one hand, refers to classical forms and concepts of sculpture (composition, volume, plasticity), and on the other, to ultra-modern performance practices and media technologies. Behind this search for a new visuality of the plastic system lies a rethinking of the understanding of monumentality and frailty.

The central object, the sculpture “Mother” with children hanging on her massive body, is visually captured in a performative “affect” like a collective body and refers to both the religious Middle Ages and the Baroque, eras in which man was not only the center of the world, but a being wrapped in the web of the universe. The polyphonic structure of interlocking bodies in space is likened to a choir that “fights its own disintegration” (Ulrike Hass, “Chorkörper”), balancing between harmony and chaos. This can neither be invented nor changed.